Hot Speadsheet Action!

It appears that your columns are getting a little too familiar with your rows.  

We've been taking a look at the spreadsheet of our portfolio, especially sector weighting.. The moral of the story is that we should be close to 10% for each of the ten sectors in order to have a truly balanced portfolio. But if you take sectors like real estate and financials, we are okay being light here and there, since these aren't investments that work with our current philosophy. We are reluctant to go into real estate, because it just doesn't seem like the safest bet for profits, and financials have burned the economy as a whole in the past. Both of these sectors just don't appeal to us, at least not yet. 

We're overweight in telecom, staples, utilities. These are all the least volatile of the sectors.

We looked for nice, calm investments with dividends, so it makes sense that our portfolio is a little overweight in these sorts of investments. 

Energy and financials are probably about where we want them to be, so we need to focus elsewhere.

We have been focusing on sector-specific buys (ATT was telecom, etc.), and this approach will 

If we went sector-by-sector for the lowest five sectors, our next five buys would end up skewing things in the middle, and we would be back where we started. Perhaps the wise approach is to balance some of our buys, getting two or more sectors at once. We have been on the track of balancing out portfolio one sector at a time, which just may not work. This would be much easier if we were dealing in bigger numbers, i.e. not in $500 increments. 

We're not just trying to balance by sector, but also by geography, for added safety. 

We have this idea to follow a safe, conservative strategy and it might be good to consider whether or not we are actually accomplishing something with this approach. If not, we need to figure out what to change, and possibly re-evaluate our attack. 

Profit!